 We'll call to order this December 9th meeting of the Mobular Planning Commission. And first we have to approve the agenda. And we'll take a look. We have a print that proves the agenda. OK, great. Motion to approve. Second by Marcella. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? OK. The agenda is approved. Next is comments from the chair. So yeah, we could use this time to kind of update where we were, so we had talked about doing some more concerning meetings last time. So I'll start with what I did. And that's today. Well, before today, I met with a local artist who puts on a lot of events and is involved with the city in teaching classes. And she's kind of has her hands on a lot of things and about what's going on with art. And kind of based on a lot of the things from our conversation, I started an outline of a chapter for the city plan on art right now through basically three aspirations, which were public art and then supporting private art and then supporting art appreciation and art education. So those three aspirations to start with. And then I tried to put in some goals and then some strategies for some of those things so you can take a look. This is meant to be the starting skeleton for the framework. So from here, I figure we'll involve the public art commission, I'm sure, in big ways. I've got a couple of things in there, but this is definitely meant to be a thing to be wordsmithed and edited and played around with. So really, it's just meant to be a star or something. Montpelier Alive, I imagine would be involved with this. So we can get feedback from those two. And then what else are we thinking? You see Montpelier Alive puts art walk together, right? Yes, I think of Montpelier Alive just a lot. And I think Dan Grober also, whether it's Montpelier Alive or not, I think he's involved with the art classes that the city is already doing and some other things. I put in a thing about affordability, by the way, in the art education. I think that's something to put in there to make sure that the city is providing our classes that are affordable for everyone. I think it's a good opportunity to make that more inclusive city plan. So I'm trying to go ahead. Isn't there just a children's art space? Have this thing maybe that I saw that was established around here, but I can't remember. Maybe I need to go back and look. I don't know, the library does events, literally similar. Tell me where that is because it's much easier. And VCFA, anything with them? Oh, that's true. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, high school does a lot of events. In terms of art education, the senior center does a lot with that too, so operating all of the various people who are doing this. Yeah. I didn't put anything about senior center specifically in, but that is something that this artist talked to me about. So we can take a look at that. And yeah, once we start getting some feedback, I think we can, like, I'm comfortable with us handling that chapter. Look, we don't need to outsource it, but we can see how it goes. I feel more comfortable with a lot of comment from the public art commission. Oh, yeah. Like, that's one entire aspiration, at least, that that commission could flush out. OK. That's all I had. Did anyone else take a look at the materials online on either housing or historic preservation stuff? Have anything to say? Well, I looked at the historic preservation stuff, but I guess I was expecting to see, like, track changes and notes. So I didn't realize it had been changed, so I can't. But I looked at it substantively, because I was, like, fooling around with, like, am I not getting the comments to show up? Yeah, after I edited it, I started to edit it. I started realizing, well, we'll see. If you guys want me to, I can do a compare documents and show the difference between what you had last time and the current version that we have. Or we can just build off of this one. Probably not a big deal to do a compare docs if you guys wanted that. I think the most important thing is just that the HPC gets the comments we had and makes sure that they answer them directly. Yeah. Comments as well as the changes that we actually recommended. Yeah, everything. How does everyone feel about the accessibility of the website right now, like, as you took a look? Like, I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but I just wonder if, like, do we feel like the public can access it? Or if we find what they need to kind of follow some of what we're doing? So the public can access it off the city website? If they click the right thing, they go to the city plan, right, and then within the city plan section? Not sure the specific path to get there. I mean, can we just ask a couple people not on the commission to test it? I mean, I'm happy to do that. Yeah, I think it would be good to see. I worry a little bit about making sure it's accessible. It might not be a lot of demand right now to access it, but I think as we can move along, it will be. Yeah. I am meeting with Stone Environmental with John Adams tomorrow morning because they're working on the ArcGIS hub, which is similar to what John had been working on with some of the website page things. So we may get that set up. If we get that set up, that'll within a month. Stone is trying to do one page for each of the city departments. And so we're going to do our planning one on the city plan update. So we'll see what they come up with. I'm not very tax savvy on those, so I'll look to them to kind of go through and make some good suggestions, whether it's Stone or whether it's John. Obviously John's really good at the GIS stuff as well. So that might be an easier link to kind of get there. So Stone is doing one on each department? For each department, yeah, DPW. They did the snow plow one. Oh, great. OK. I looked at that. So that is online if they move along. Yeah, I think they've got one for DPWs was for winter operations. So they wanted to explain to people how winter operations work so people can understand and hopefully we'll get fewer questions in the office if people can go and understand. I don't understand. Somebody just came through with a plow and just plowed down the middle of the street doesn't make any sense. Why did they do that? They didn't even plow the street. It's like, well, there's a system to it. They send one that goes up the middle and then they send the other trucks that come through and clean up the edges. And there's just a system that they have for doing it. Or nobody's plowed my street. And actually, you can look online at a real-time tracker that'll tell you where the current snow plows are and what the snow plow routes are. So it's a pretty informative page, web page. And so we will get one for planning. And we'll do the city plan. So we'll probably have more of an interactive map like John was trying to set up so people can add comments or what they like or don't like or what we want to maintain or evolve or transform and give people an opportunity to comment there. So that's the thought behind the story map. But I'll be meeting with John and the folks from Stone Environmental tomorrow morning on that. OK. Yeah. So that may replace this Google page. Yeah, so we can wait to do that then. OK. That's great. Are your concerns just about the interfaces actually? Because just to sort of put a fun point out, I feel like the interface is a little, it's not what I would expect it to be. But I don't think it's bad. I think it's just different than them. The first couple of times I use it, I'm like, this just seems a little. I had a little trouble getting there, which then I started thinking about all the different people and all the different residents and all the, you know, about there. Yeah, right? I don't know what the average amount of tech savviness is in the world these days. So if you didn't approach it the way a public person would, how did you approach it? I tried both ways. Oh, OK. I tried going in normally, and then I also tried just using the link. The link, of course, was pretty easy. The link provided to us, yeah. But then you get to the point where you've done it a few times and you don't know if it's, is it easy for me because I already know what I'm doing? Right, right. So that's why I'm kind of asking the group, you know. Yeah, it could probably be streamlined a little bit, but I think for, right, especially where we are right now, it's probably OK. Well, if it's, I mean, if it's changing big in a big way, then we can wait for it to cut out later. That sounds great. Sounds really good. All right, that's all I have. So on the agenda, the next thing is the minute, or no, the next thing is general business and we have no members of the public here to discuss general business that's not on the agenda. So we'll skip by that and then we'll go on to consider the minutes. So we're going to take a look at the minutes from last time. Second. All right, first and second. Everyone ready to vote? OK. All in favor of bringing the notes? Aye. Opposed? OK. That's very good. Yay. Next item we have is to continue. It says to continue our discussion on the historical and cultural resources chapter before we. So where were we? We were on the last page. We were on the last. So until we get comments, so we can try to pick a forward word, Mike, if you could help us with that. But I'm thinking we can also tonight move on to housing. Yeah, and I didn't know at the time I put together the agenda whether other people would be working online to add comments to the historic changes. And if people had put in comment, maybe we would talk about them. But if people haven't had a chance and we think we were done with the comments for now, then we could just move on to housing. And the Historic Preservation Commission will see the comments and the questions tomorrow night. That's tomorrow night's their meeting. Mike, can you just? I'm fine with actually moving on to the housing piece. But can you just, for all our benefit, can you give us a 30,000-foot view on what changes were made from the September version to the December version? All right, I don't have all my notes in front of me. The big change was really we eliminated the cultural. We pulled that out, so it's not historic and cultural. It's just historic. And then I think there were just a number of relatively smaller changes. We moved a couple. I asked a couple of questions. I think there was one on what was up with the... Nobody really could understand what it was they were asking for about the themes. Oh, yeah. And so, yeah, the historic themes on front, I think it was identify and develop historic contexts or themes, and that was the historic preservation really wanted that for their walking tours. They just weren't clear about saying it. So they wanted to be able to establish themes so they could do the walking tours. So I took that out of Aspiration A and put it into Aspiration B and then kind of tied it in there. So it was really just a lot of my memory social correctly. It's just a bunch of line items stuff that can be captured pretty easily in a compare. Yeah, I thought so. And I gave the direction I gave to Meredith meeting tomorrow with historic preservation was really to start to go through. And I think you guys had some comments about, maybe we should pick one of six or how many of these would we be doing? Like in the strategies on the first page, there are six or seven bullets there. Are we really intending on doing all seven or should we have, I think John's suggestion was, we should do at least one of these or at least two of these. So that way we've got a benchmark that we can go through and say after eight years, did we do what we had set out to do? So that list of questions that we came up with at the last meeting have not been presented? They have not. They're meeting tomorrow night. But Meredith has that list of questions. Yeah, Meredith has that list. That's kind of what I was wondering. Did we actually set any benchmarks or did they set any benchmarks? They didn't set any benchmarks. In some of them we don't need to if we're continuing policies or we're doing policies those are those who really don't need a benchmark. But I think the reference was in cases where we had a list of things, we should hear a list of eight things we could do. Well, let's go and say how many of them we intend to do. And then the other thing they were gonna do is to kind of go through and pick out the things. The other I think you guys had was to talk about what are the priorities, higher, medium and low priorities and perhaps what are the costs or who is gonna do them. And so they were gonna go through and try to look at things like compile an oral history. Is that high priority or low priorities that not really mattered? So, you know, and then to have them think about are you really gonna do all of these strategies or the really things that these are nice things that we would eventually like to do, but you know. In the next eight years, we don't plan on doing this. Well, let's take that out for now. We can put it in the box that says these are ideas for another time, but. So that's what they'll be discussing. I don't know how much they'll get through tomorrow, but they've got that list. Do we wanna ask them to set some kind of benchmarks just to sort of hold their feet to the fire if there are important things, particularly around establishing some of their programs without. I think I would leave it up to them. I mean, if they narrow it down so they only have two on the list, they go through and say, look, the only thing we're gonna work on is doing a historic inventory of the meadow and getting that in as a historic district. Great. I don't think we need to prioritize or have a benchmark. We're only gonna say we're doing one. You know, when we stopped last time, I don't actually have my. Because I don't think I would edit this note otherwise the federal funding review. Yeah. So it looks like we got through onto the last page and whether you've got the new one or the old one, they'll just make a different what page it's on. But it looks like we did, if you've got the one that's over there, at the bottom of page three, we've got the last time, so that's why you're on page. Yeah, no, I wanted to have all the questions. So the bottom of page three, adopt the policy that any section 106 response involving historic resources will be provided to the Historic Preservation Commission. So that was the last one that we did. And so the rest of these, we didn't continue to assist property. So all of these ones that are in that list, we don't need to prioritize. These are just things, in that case, is a continue. These are things we already do. And there's 10 as needed basis if we get somebody who comes in in needs of federal tax credit, Kevin will write that grant application for them. But do they actually assist historic property owners with grant writing for brownfield loans and grants? If it qualifies for the state program, we assist with brownfield loans and grants. You do, but not the commission. No, that's a staff. That's a staff. That's a staff one. Yeah, it's not clear to me where that kind of breaks into just the staff, but as opposed to what the commission's saying they weren't gonna do. But this is a document that articulates what the city does. Yes. Generally. Yes. And that was a little bit- It's not commission specific. Actually, but many of the other things are things that the commission's going to do. Sure. But there's still an arm of the city that's contemplated with the document. Yeah, we've had that with a couple of commissions to remind them that the plan they're writing is not necessarily their plan, their committee plan. It's the city plan and we're asking them to participate in writing that. And so in some cases, the items that are gonna get done, maybe things they are not doing. So ultimately the strategies will be assigned as to a responsible party. Yeah. And okay. Yeah. And some of it from the standpoint of staff are things, it's less of an issue now than it was a few years ago when we were looking at staff cuts. But we wanted to be able to go through and be able to capture what are all the responsibilities that certain staff members do. So if that staff members position is cut or cut down in time, then we can reflect that and go and say, well, this person is also responsible for all of this. So that hasn't been an issue lately. But when we conceived of this, that was something we were thinking of is to make sure we reflect what staff does as well. I think that looking at that vein, I think it makes some sense to replace Historic Preservation Commission and throughout this chapter with just the city. Yeah, I think some of this will go back to John's comment on making sure that we have the priorities and who is gonna do it and what the cost is, even if the cost is low, medium and high. That we, within the strategy, initially our thought was we would have that embedded within those links, but considering we're not gonna have those links done, we should instead reflect who is doing it and a little bit of the cost or maybe that's in a footnote at the end of the piece, but we should have a little bit of what's the priority? What's the cost and who's doing it? And if it's staff, then it would just go down to staff. And the cost is gonna be difficult. Yeah, in some cases that's gonna be a tough one. We'll have to establish something that'll be consistently applied throughout the document. What's a low value, less than $1,000? What's a medium value, $1,000 to, I don't know, we'll have to come up with some range that we would apply to each one and go and say, well, this is relatively cheap, relatively inexpensive process or more expensive. Can I just ask a quick question about the strategy to revise the city's agreement with the Capital Complex Commission to administer design review rules? What are the changes that you're anticipating or that you're anticipating? So the issue we've had, and this has been an ongoing one for? Years. Years. So if you don't know, the Capital Complex is an area bounded by basically Bailey and Taylor Street and Governor Davis. So within that box with the river is the Capital Complex and it's basically like Washington, D.C. It kinda cuts out and they do their own regulations. Predominantly, they just look at design review. And so we've had some running disputes with them about who's doing what. So we have recognized that their position is they are completely autonomous, no zoning, nothing applies to them. There's a problem in that eight privately owned parcels are in that as well. So, and they don't look at a whole bunch of things. So they have no rules on parking. They have no rules on setbacks. They have no rules on most things that you would see in a set of zoning regulations because they're only looking at design review. So we've been trying to go and argue that, yes, you guys claim your exempt, we don't think under law. They have that broad of a thing. So we've gone through and tried on multiple occasions to negotiate a compromise. I would say, look, we'll regulate zoning for these eight parcels, but we won't do design review. You guys will do design review. We'll regulate everything else. We'll look at stormwater. We'll look at impervious cover. We'll look at, they want nothing to do with that. They wanna be completely exempt, but they don't do stormwater runoff. They don't do things that we're just like, you just, you don't get to do this like this anymore. So pretty much the only thing we have is flood hazard. And actually what we have in practice been doing is we do regulate the zoning and we do exempt design review because that'll go through the state. So we pretty much are operating under what we think the agreement should be. If it's a state property, we'll give you full exemptions on everything, except flood hazard because it has to be that way. But we have pretty much said, whatever you, the state wanna do, you're welcome to do. But for those eight parcels, we're gonna enforce zoning. We would like to have that in the agreement, but they haven't been willing to come along with it, but it's just been a thing. It's just bureaucracy being bureaucracy. So I didn't realize that they didn't have stormwater. No, they don't regulate. They just do design. They don't look at parking, how many parking spaces? They don't look at stormwater. They don't look at, there's no setback requirements. There's no height requirements. There's no, they just don't have any regulations. They just have a design review manual. And so we're like. Who makes that decision at the state? It was a decision by the attorney general. Well, it's the capital complex commission who is staffed by BGS. And so they don't want to have to deal with the city and that's fine, but they rely on a very old attorney general opinion, which is based on state law that has since been replaced and doesn't exist anymore. So they believe their exemption is X, but if you actually read the statute, that law no longer exists and was replaced in 2005 with one that just says they're exempt from design review, which is our position. That looks pretty clear. So it's just been, we figure, we keep waiting every time there's a change of administration. We kind of go back in and say, we'd love to do this. And we've had varying degrees of support to make changes, but we never could nail down a final approval on that. So have you been working with the capital complex commission? Or would be- Sarah McShane did a lot when she was the zoning administrator. So she was working a lot, trying to push that through, but we just couldn't get enough common ground. So we eventually just dropped it and figured, well, we've got drafts and we're willing to reconnect with these at a later date. So we'll see. So that's why we've just kept the revised agreement in there mostly because it's not that critical. We do what we think is right anyways. They haven't either figured it out that we're doing it or- What do you mean you do what you think? You mean those parcels still come in- Yeah. So for example, I think VNRC recently did some work on their building or moved to it or is looking at another building. So they're in the capital complex. They're one of the privately owned parcels. So they came in, they pulled the zoning permit from us. We issued the zoning permit. The state would have, if we had asked the state, they would have said, no, you have no authority to issue a zoning permit in our complex. Therefore, they don't require a zoning permit at all. There is no zoning. They would say there is no zoning permit. There is only the capital complex approval, which is not recorded in the land records in which case it goes very difficult to defend and enforce. And it's just, they're not there, not set up to do administration. And it shows when you get into the details, the nuts and bolts of, you know, why don't you guys make a decision and give it to us? Then when somebody comes in and does a title search to sell that property, they will see all of the decisions and everything can be owned. But it can only hurt those property owners. Yes. Not follow the law and then something happens. Yeah. So we try, what we think would be the appropriate thing, which is on these eight parcels, we work to have them get all their zoning approval and then we tell them for design review, you need to go to the state. So. So this is asking for the city to have an opportunity to comment on design review for historic resources. To clarify the roles. Yes. So the first, what I was talking about was the first piece to clarify the roles and responsibilities. And the historic preservation commission has requested the second. Because right now it's all with the state. Yeah. Yeah. And they would like the ability to be able to provide comment. It seems like there's a lot of other ways to approach this. One would be to ask for a new AG's opinion. Yes, we could. And we worked with our attorneys and coming up with our recommendations when we came through and really our attorney's opinion was, you know, let's pick our battles and pick our places where we. Yeah, I mean. So I'm not sure. It's not great to be in between the politics of the AG's office and the governor and BGS. Yeah. It's not a great place to be. Really? Yeah. We figured there will be a time that will come up and then it will make sense to reintroduce it. You know, if there's a change in administration at some point or just a change in who's running a certain department that it might make sense to just go through and say now might be a good time to reintroduce this conversation. There's a lot more in that strategy than I realized. Yeah. But it's a key piece from historic protection and historic preservation standpoint because it is our, you know, most of our most historic buildings are most iconic buildings, I guess, are there in the Capitol complex and we really don't have very much control over that area. We talked about view sheds and much of it was view of the Capitol building. Yeah, but it's usually from views from outside of the Capitol complex. But looking at it. Yeah. Right. Looking into the Capitol complex. So we want to make sure we're maintaining something we want to look at. But they generally do a good job with their building. So we haven't had any interest in getting involved in their things. But the preservation commission does? They wanted an opportunity to comment on projects which I think is, I don't think it's necessary to be in here because I think historic preservation technically could appear. The Capitol complex commission is a public body and their meetings are warrant. So they could just have somebody who has access to that agenda in order to keep an eye on the agenda and provide comment when a project comes up that they want to comment on. Well, so the last couple of things here, the continue to participate in certified local government and the designated downtown program. Is it, Mike, do you think this is the most appropriate place to mention those things? Do you think it's fine to lay the plan out like that? Well, I mean, in this case, I mean, these are just the continues, I mean, we're already at CLG. CLG only applies to historic preservation. So this would be the place to put that in. The designated downtown program can apply to a number of chapters, and it will probably be in a number of chapters, but there are a lot of programs within the designated downtown program. Specifically targeted to historic structures. So it's, do you think it's fine? Yeah, I would keep them in. And I like, I mean, it's your plan ultimately. I've been thinking to just continue to put it in at the areas where it's appropriate. If we're talking about economic development, you know, that's another place where a designated downtown program applies, and we'll have a recommendation to continue to participate in the designated downtown program in that chapter as well. Okay. Unless anyone wants to revisit anything, we can table this for now until we get feedback. So with that, we can move on to the housing chapter. I didn't put them over there because I didn't know which ones we get to. And if I hand them out, then I've got to go and re-print them for next time, so. That has not changed. This has not changed. Okay, I've got this already. I might have this one. You might already have that one too. All right. Oh, does that say historic? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I've got one. Oh, yeah. I almost got it. I almost got it mixed. That's just historic. This says housing. Do you have November 22nd housing? Yeah. There's a housing. Yeah. That's the one of these. That's the current iteration. The number 22nd one's the current one. Uh-huh. Yeah, all right, there we have it. You can have all of these. Thank you. Thank you. Can I bring up the question that I emailed? Yes. Like, which I don't think is a, but so there's a relatively newly formed homelessness task force in Montpelier. So I thought it possible to get their contributions because they are thinking of, you know, how the city can address this issue. And Mike just brought up the question. I mean, obviously some of this may relate to housing, although I think a lot of it is gonna be more community services slash shelter space, which, whether you consider that housing or not, is a tricky question. But, I mean, I'm happy to just send them the format of the goals, aspirations, and see where they get on it. But I don't know. Usually I can meet with groups when they get it, they don't feel too left out there. Okay. I can see what their schedule is and see about. They meet at Wednesdays at noon, and they are meeting every week. Oh, every week, okay. But yeah, I'll, maybe I'll just, or maybe I'll just ask one of them to email you about a good time to come because there's a lot, there's a lot going on in that. I know they've been doing a lot of budget discussions and I've got a couple of committees that are really kind of focused on budget stuff that. Yeah. So I'll ask someone to follow up with you. Okay, I just wanted to follow up on that. So yeah, the question that came up was really about whether it would be appropriate to have these discussions here in the housing chapter and, you know, my reply was, you know, some of these things just depend on where we want to put them. Is it, we're gonna have a chapter for community services, is what we're doing for the, through the homelessness task force, a community service, or is it housing, or is there, you know, and that's gonna be really dependent on what they're doing, I think. I like the idea of making sure, at least in the housing chapter, that we are clear that there's a room in this city for these things, for shelters. That is something that, you know, is desirable. I think, I may have mentioned this before too, I think that it will be important for our plan to have at least something about treatment housing for drug addiction, because that's, there's a shortage of that in the state, and there's almost none south of Burlington. So for us to say, hey, there's a place in our city for that, it seems that those two things go together and housing's a good place for it. Yeah, and I mean, I think it may be something that comes in as a goal or a strategy under D, which is really our, it's really our, Montpelier will have housing for all, and we'll be affirmatively further fair housing, and that really is a large catch-all that really is, it's really meant to be just that, that we, you know, everybody who's a resident who lives here in Montpelier, you know, we wanna meet that need, and for anyone who wants to move here, we should be having housing available. You know, we're obviously having housing shortages right now, you know, even for people who can afford it, even if you could afford it, you couldn't live in Montpelier because there's just not housing that's for sale. So what we're talking about is some kind of a temporary housing regarding, excuse me, the shelters and things like that. Yeah, I don't think there's a goal or a strategy directly reflected in that, so we should think about how we would put that in. But, you know, not just, as Kirby was mentioning, not just for homelessness or transitional, but the housing for drug addiction, and I'm sure the Justice Center would comment on people who are reintegrating into society from through the prison program, and those, you know, we should have the housing that kind of addresses all the needs that regionally we shouldn't be deferring our, you know, a portion of our population to say, well, they should find their housing and bury. It's like, well, no, there's percentage-wise we should be accommodating a fair share of all those housing needs, whether it's transitional housing or group housing or whatever it is. Can I just write up a bit on this document? So this was submitted by the Housing Task Force, right? Yeah, I do the framework, and I come up with things, and then they work on them. So just a quick question, because there's also the monthly housing authority, right? So can you explain to me again what the difference between those two are and what their sort of focus is? I get them confused. I know that they're both correct. All right, so the Task Force is a, it's actually an ad hoc group. They're not actually technically appointed by city council there, and they reflect a number of the key partners, including the Montpelier Housing Authority in Downstreet and Interfaith Action and Legal Aid and a couple other ones that are in there. Okay. But the Montpelier Housing Authority is a specific organization that used to be part of the city, probably back a few decades, and then since is kind of separated out into its own quasi-governmental. We don't fund them. They're not, they don't work. They're not city employees. Yeah. What's their mission? They authorize section eight housing. Yeah, they do this section eight housing. They're quasi-governmental agency. I don't know if they're actually their own municipality, kind of like the schools become their own municipality. I don't know if they technically have that status or if they're just- Yeah, and they're administering federal funds. Yeah, they're almost 100% federal funds. They operate certain housing. I honestly, unfortunately, cannot off the top of my head name them here. Well, the Pioneer Apartment, is that what it's called? And the roundabout. Yeah. There are some specific housing groups. Yeah, there's fixed, yeah, they've got some that are fixed housing vouchers and then they do the housing vouchers and then they have the fixed units. So the test course is an ad hoc group that has representatives from the housing authority and those other legal aid and all that, or they're just an ad hoc group that is understood to represent those interests? I'm just trying to figure it out. They are the, so the group, if you were to go to a housing task force meeting, you would find the executive director of the housing authority. Downstreet has not the executive director, but one of their employees goes to all the meetings. You know, we've got Polly and I mean, they could go through and probably name most of them. But yeah, so everybody usually sends, actually Jack McCullough, who's now a city councilor rep, he was actually there as to represent him from Vermont legal aid. Jen Holler is there, I think, representing Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. But I don't think, I mean, I don't think there's no roles that have to be represented. No, they just- It's just people who are into housing. Into housing. I don't want to be very serious. No, I'm just curious about the composition that the group was and where they sort of, there's a lot of housing nerds and mobiliators there. And it's safe for them to go. And they all come together, and yeah, they all come together and I think they started in 1999 to go through and say, you know, what can we do to help housing and further housing? And that's helpful, but it's just, when I was reading the document, I was like, who are these guys exactly? But they do act on the housing, the revolving around them. They are administering? I think there's a, sorry. Yeah. Sorry, I can't help but trip in. I think there's a separate committee, yeah. Yeah, there's a trust fund committee. Trust fund committee. Which does, which only meets like once a year. So what is the role of the housing task force then with the revolving long fund? They, they don't. So we've got, they've got, so the trust fund technically now has two funds. We've got the housing trust fund and we have a revolving loan fund. So we actually have two. So they, they will come up with programs. So usually what happens is once a year, they will establish a program that we'll go through and say, oh, we should have a program for first time home buyer. And this is what it's gonna be. And Downstreet makes the proposal that goes, it says, hey look, we've got funding for first time home buyer program. If the city matches those funds, we could put those together and we could help people buy homes in Montpelier. It's a very expensive place. The city council approves that. Or the trust fund looks at it and says, yes, this furthers our housing goals, makes recommendation to city council. City council approves it. It then goes to Kevin, the community development specialist in my office to actually administer the program. So once that's done, we do all the processing. You know, if you wanna buy a house, you come in, you ask Kevin. Well, actually you go to Downstreet, they run it and then they give all the stuff to Kevin and he looks at all the stuff and says, yep, you check all the boxes and we cut a check and bring it to your closing. So that's the way that the programs work and what the task force would do is to help write guidelines and how we should spend the money. And then it makes recommendations to council. The task force also makes recommendations for how much money we should fund into the housing trust fund. So they'll be meeting, I think on Wednesday with city council to go through and make a pitch for how much money should go in the budget into the housing trust fund. It's kind of an annual thing and what are things we should be recommending. So it kind of blur a little bit. So we've got most of the stuff goes through the trust fund but we do have a revolving loan fund that was created last year from leftover money. So we had community development funds for decades and we've recycled them and then we finally reached a point where we asked the state if we could just take the funds out of federal oversight and just because it already met all the obligations and then move them into individual funds. So now they're looking at how should we spend these revolving loan funds that we have because they have been very difficult for us to use because they were stuck with these old restrictions. So we had a housing preservation grant program that people in town were eligible for. But in order to get access to the funds you have to prove that you can't afford to pay back the loan, basically. So it ended up with these weird restrictions that somebody was in a position that needed the help we really couldn't help them because you have to prove that you can't get a loan from a bank and while now that we have that restriction out of the way we can take that money and come up with a better way of helping our community. Maybe it's a housing preservation grant maybe it's something else but the restrictions have gone away except that we need to use it to further housing. So we've got a couple hundred thousand dollars that we can now use. That's what they do. I think one thing we can add to last time was the percentage for vacancies doesn't necessarily match the number of units, that's the goal. Is that where the 240 versus 150 comes in? No, well the 150 was for five years. That was the adopted in the EDSP but this is an eight year plan so we just multiplied the formula and kept it going out for another three more years which would be 240 units. Yeah the two aspects of this benchmark don't seem to quite fit. It's, yeah I mean we can go through and look at the edits. If something were to have happened where we added a number of housing units and for some reason a whole bunch of people moved to Florida. And suddenly rental vacancies went up to 8%. We probably wouldn't have as much of the second goal because we wouldn't be looking to add more housing and create more vacancies. The reason why we have the bottom is because there's a very low vacancy rate less than 1% right now and the question is how can we do that while our goal is we're gonna increase housing by 150 units and then continue to monitor the situation and maybe it goes up to 240 by 2028. We're just gonna keep adding housing units until we start to see some vacancies. This sort of assumes a static population then. I mean that's the part I don't understand. If everything we've talked about in the past is if we increase housing more people will come here. Therefore it won't affect that vacancy rate at all because we have more housing. We'll just have more people. Yes, there will be more people. The expectation is at a certain point you reach a point where you're adding some units but there aren't people to fill them. So we'll add 150 housing units. There's two people per housing unit but we only add 260 people. Well now we've created some vacancies. So we have built more than. Or else we've created some units that have a lower than 2.0. Yeah, but the idea is we're looking at trying to get vacancies because that's what gets your, the pressure to increase rent comes when you have less than 5%. That's what the models will show you. So if you've got 1% vacancy you can expect the rents will increase which is why rents have increased faster than incomes and everything else is just because we don't have enough housing. So, there's a number of. Do we have an actual idea of what the demand is? Like for instance, if demand is extreme you could add 100 units and the vacancy rates would stay the same. Because the demand's from outside the city, right? Yeah. Do we have any ideas? I don't know if we have anything concrete that we can put our hand on. We know, for example, that to reach 5% vacancy you'd need probably 60 units vacant in the city at any one time. And you expect that they're not gonna be vacant for long. I mean, there's always gonna be people coming in, people going out. It's not the same units vacant for, but you'd expect to have about 60 units that would be vacant, so. I mean, if I could, what usually happens for housing projects to get a market study in the market study will look at how many households are in the area do a certain percentage of who's likely to move, how many people rent versus own. So it's like an import. I mean, that's like the tool, I think. And then there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that you'll hear from realtors or landlords or stuff like that. I think that's how people get it to me. Yeah, you have an absorption rate that they would look at. And that's true of whether you're talking about a commercial, you know, when Fred Connor Pat Malone is working on a commercial retail project, they're gonna have this thing in the back that they'll go and say, well, our absorption rate for this amount of square feet is gonna probably be 24 to 36 months. So we'll build it out. It'll probably be vacant for a little while, but it'll fill up. Same thing with rental units. There's gonna be an estimate. I mean, we can pretty much look at the 48 units that were built in the past 12 months that came on the market between Taylor Street and French Block. And I would bet we could call Down Street they're probably, if they're not booked up, they're probably pretty close to, it doesn't take long to fill those units. You were already somewhat, some occupied during their open house. During their open house, they were already occupied. So I think our expectation is that it would be pretty high, which is why knowing we need at least 60 to reach 5%, assuming nobody moved to town, we just built 60 units, we'd reach 5%. They are also addressing, which isn't really reflected in here, the issue of Airbnb and some short-term rentals. We have 60 short-term rentals currently, which goes through and says, well, there's our 5% vacancy, it's just taken up with people who, departments that could be rented out to people. Is that Airbnb? Sorry, it's like 60 Airbnb's that are registered and, wow. Yeah. Are they registered or is that just, we just, someone got online and looked? Yeah, we went online and looked. Oh, okay, or, well, they are, oh, I guess they don't have to register with the city, but they do with the state now for, right, this, sorry. Yes, I think you're right. Yeah, I think there's, they do have to pay the additional, the taxes. Rooms and meals. Rooms and meals taxes. So it's one of those. As a representative of the tax department, I'll tell you, that's confidential information. Oh, how many, how many? How many? Even how many people are paying, Rooms and meals, and the city is confidential. Yeah, you wouldn't, I mean, the city would be able to get information from the tax department on stuff like that. Would not. No. Oh, okay. You're better off just going to the website itself to see if you can. Yeah, that's how we always do it. We always just go onto the top two or three companies and just go and look at them up. And in some cases, you can determine, oh, this is a snow bird, and this is somebody renting a room within the house, so those really don't count, you know. It's kind of being more of a B&B. What we are concerned about, or they are concerned about, are the ones where it's clearly somebody has removed an apartment from, yeah. Well, yeah, I'm interested in having your B&Bs be registered in towns, but anyway, maybe we don't wanna go down that road. So they are looking at a number of things about that vacancy rate. How can we get that 5% vacancy rate? And as I said, with the idea of 60, just to get the 5%, we know our target number has to be greater than 60. Significantly greater than 60. Significantly greater than 60. So that's why it came out as 150. Housing units in five years was the goal that started actually in 2017. So we're still looking at trying to absorb or trying to get constructed, you know, about 30 units a year is our goal. And more or less, we'll do better some years, worse than others, but we wanna just keep adding more housing units as much as we can. So we wouldn't get that vacancy rate until all of the units had been added potentially. Potentially, yeah. I mean, markets change. I mean, if suddenly there were a great number of jobs created in a different community and suddenly a lot of people decided it was, you know, if I'm working in Waterbury, I'll move to Waterbury and a bunch of vacancies came up. If possible, we can reach it through other ways. But our reality and our hope is that people aren't leaving, that this is just, this is reflecting demand. You know, Berry City does have vacancies. So it's not a regional issue. You have available units in Berry City. We don't here in Montpelier. So it's a measure of quality and quantity. Well, in terms of the housing units, it just seems low. It seems like a low number. Oh, well, it's very difficult having, you know, we looked at this number and we thought that that was a low number when Kevin and I were talking. It's been a challenge. I mean, we have a goal of creating housing, but we're not gonna pick up any nail. We're not gonna pound any nails. We're not gonna, you know, we don't, we have to encourage other people to build housing and how can we do that? You know, we have programs that get us, you know, the accessory, the ADU program will get us 10 to 15 more. But when you start looking about all of these different things, it's gonna be very difficult to get large numbers unless we do large projects like Taylor Street and, you know, French Block was a large project and I would only add at 18 units. A very important 18 units, but when we start looking at how do we get 30 a year, it's like, well, that's, you know, two French Block projects a year. How can we get the housing market to start picking up and doing theirs? But there hasn't been, there hasn't been the market. It seems like there's potential for some very large projects though, like Sabans. Yes, Sabans, Sabans, VCFA, parcel next to it. There are a number of places that there's Stonewall Meadows, which is out towards, up on Berlin Street, yeah. So what's the potential, oh, because they have a lot of problems. There was a lot of land that was originally subdivided. I had potential for 70, if we were looking for a place to have single family homes, that would be affordable, that would be a location that could take them. So we do have a lot of Sabans pastor, yeah. Limited sites, number of sites. Crestview, Crestview is another large parcel. That would be probably more high-end housing. So we have, we do have potential, the issue is trying to get, you know, obviously we would love to get, you know, if we get a project for Sabans pastor, that could be 200 housing units. You know, we could make our 150 in short order, but that's, we're kind of balancing that with the reality of doing modest infill through these one project at a time, adding accessory dwelling units, turning duplexes into triplexes and triplexes into quadplexes. We're not looking to encourage people to do what happens in other places in San Francisco, where, you know, buy three houses and tear them down to put in a big project. You know, we don't want people coming in and tearing down the fabric of our neighborhoods. You know, we're trying to work with what we have, although we would love to get a big project that could do a Sabans pastor. So are we doing as much as we can to encourage private developers to develop housing? Well, that's kind of all of aspiration A. I mean, that kind of gives us what the kickoff for aspiration A, which is to have the healthy housing market, the supply of housing in a mixture of types, sizes, occupancies and levels of affordability. And so we go through whether, I think, goal A is the rental housing and goal B is kind of your single family housing, your four sale single family housing. And then goal C is kind of gets into discussion of the mixes of housing types and occupancies and levels. So we do have a number of programs, some that we're recommending, some that are existing. So they're looking at adding utility and infrastructure incentive programs. That's kind of a little bit of a tiff. We did an example of this mini tiff for Caledonia Spirits. They needed some large infrastructure. So the city went through and did the infrastructure on our dime, and then through their increased water usage and increased taxes, we take a portion of that to pay back that loan. It's a mini tiff that doesn't use school, so it doesn't go through the state. It's just our local. But it helps to go through and take a project that's possible, but for, it needs a certain amount of infrastructure improvement. So we've done this once, but we could certainly replicate that same idea for housing. So if somebody had a housing idea that said, boy, we could do this, but there's only a six inch water main. We would need eight to do a sprinkler and we're required to do a sprinkler. Well, maybe we have the opportunity of using, borrowing and doing this mini tiff that goes through and says that new building is gonna generate X amount taxes. We could take a percentage of those new taxes to pay back the loan. Otherwise, they won't build the building at all. You can't build a six or an eight unit building if you can't sprinkler the building. So, and if they can't sprinkler the building because there's not a water line in the road that big enough, then we might go through and say, well, we'll upgrade the water line and you pay us back. And that's kind of a little bit of the theory. So that you actually are calling them mini tiffs? That's how we've kind of described it. But there are various tools that can be used. Tax stabilization can be used if it's a commercial housing project. So that was a new addition. So we've got the ADU program. We've got to, again, the comment before continue to participate in the downtown program and growth center programs because those do add benefits to housing. If you're in the growth center, then you have less exposure to Act 250. And that can save you a lot of money if you don't have to go through Act 250. And then we just have a number of these unified development regulations. Which are the zoning? What is the municipal administrative procedure today? So MAPPA, we have talked about doing MAPPA in the city for a number of years. And it would have been extremely helpful in, say, the hotel parking garage. If you do MAPPA, then you can't be, then you're not a DeNovo appeal to the state. So you agree to operate through a higher level of process. And if you meet this higher level of process, then the state will only look at you, I don't know what's the appetite of DeNovo. On the record. On the record, there we go. So it would be an on the record review. So instead, what would happen is they would, the judge would actually take the decision and we pretty much do enough to already qualify. We just haven't officially gone through to adopt it. And it's been an interest because a number of projects have been sidelined in the city by neighbors. And so if we had more of a MAPPA administrative process, it could help to streamline the appeal process and keep projects from getting sidelined. So there's a certain level of development that required for that? You said we qualify. Well, we first have to agree to do it and then we just need to then find all the procedures that we aren't doing and start to do them. So for example, if we were gonna, we would have to enter things into evidence and we would have to number them and then in our decisions, we'd have to number them. We don't currently do that. Do you provide pretty robust? We have extremely robust decisions. I mean, I think the hotel decisions were 40 pages long. Right, but the process, that's kind of what that is. Yeah, the process, I mean, some of the process things are difficult for other communities. Our requirements for process, you know, they have to be videotaped. We already do that. They have to be, you know, there's certain requirements you have to meet. I think the issue is we don't meet our certain admission of evidence. The advantage we have, Meredith, who is our zoning administrator, is actually an attorney. She has her license in the state, so she could do all the MAPPA requirements very easily. I think she just needs to have her checklist of what to do. Yeah, it seems like a pretty high value low cost. It's one of those ones that we've had on that list. Boy, that would be really great if we could do that. It would really help to streamline things. So some of the barriers they talk about, you know, continue the requirement of only one parking space per dwelling unit and no required parking in these zoning districts. Parking is identified as a barrier to additional housing. So that's why that's reflected here. So they feel it's necessary to identify as a strategy that we would just not modify that in the zoning? Well, I mean, at this point, they've worded as continue to do it. We want to reflect what, when we write our strategies, we want to reflect what we're doing already as well as what we should be changing. If it was felt that we should expand that, then I think we would just go through and amend that to say continue this policy of having no parking requirements in these districts and explore expanding that to other districts or whatever. If there was a goal, from a parking standpoint, these were the ones that they felt, you know, there may be a different opinion from somebody in the transportation committee or an energy committee or somebody who may feel that we could move that other places, but for them, these were the highest density districts. We allow duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes as permitted uses in almost every district in the city. So that's a goal. The sprinkler ordinance was changed last year, so that's in there. Continue to support private housing projects through public-private partnerships. The sprinkler ordinance was repealed, wasn't it? No. It was amended. Amended to... Because it still applies to larger, okay. Yeah. Anything over four units. All right, it wasn't specific to just... Yeah, it used to be, everybody had to go through it. Okay. Had a serious impact on housing, I would think. So, yeah, we'll see over time how much impact that makes for new units coming online. It was like one of many barriers, but it was a big one. Well, for example, if somebody wanted to add an ADU or a duplex, they could potentially have been required just one quick, previously. So it opens up the possibility of the... A lot of the small area fields. Yeah, what the program that we are now administering, right, that you're administering, the accessory building unit program. So, otherwise we would have spent more money on each of those units. So, goal B talks about the four sale housing that's most of your single family homes. That six months supply of housing is a funky number to wrap your head around, but it really is. How many housing units would we expect? You wanna have on the market a six month supply of housing because if it's less than that, it's the same as your vacancy rates. If you end up less than that, your prices go up. So, in the past year, we've been at about two to three months. So, a house will come on the market and be sold pretty damn quick. And so that's why... More affordable ones are more like, make that days and two or three days. Yeah, before it's listed before. And that is counting all the other pieces, and that's just... Yeah. It's pretty quick that things get on and off the market. So, that's why we've seen prices of housing again still going up in the city. In the past year, prices have gone up another large percentage, and we're not gonna get that change until we can get more supply of housing on the market. Sir, were there any discussion about the size of housing? In terms of the possibility of increasing our supply of smaller housing, not just rentals, but in actual residents? Yeah, I mean, these guys captured the for sale market. I mentioned it's single family homes, but it could be condos. It could be mobile homes. It could be tiny homes. It could be any number of... Anything that's allowed. Anything that you can purchase for sale housing. That's where they look at the six month supply. As one mark, the related piece to that is usually they wanna have building lots. Usually they wanna have 24 to 36 months supply of building lots, because that will help to supply the construction of housing. But we have like no building lots. There's no... Zero supply. Yeah, there's a zero supply. So that's been one of our barriers. We kinda have to go all the way back to the kind of the basic of going saying, look, we don't have building lots. We can't even talk about building housing until we can start getting building lots. We have Sabin's pasture. We have 100 acre parcel. We don't have 80 acre subdivided lots sitting there waiting to be sold. There's just... It's until we can get that subdivided and platted, then we can go through and say, well, the road's not built there yet, but it's platted and we can talk about how to get the road built. Is that really what the city's looking at? I mean, big parcels that need to have front to back subdivision. There's no quarter acre lots here and there. There are small ones. We've gone through some of the pieces that people are looking at. The developer... So one of the issues they've identified is we don't have a developer class. So we don't have... We're not like Burlington where you've got a lot of companies that that's their job is to find pieces of land, buy them, subdivide them and build things. We don't have that class of contractor in Central Vermont. So that makes it difficult for us to kind of get those projects. What we do have is a lot of people who do repairs and small projects. So, I mean, the people that come through, there are probably 10 of them that we could go through and kind of pick them out to go through and say these are the guys who would pick up that quarter acre. Ward Joyce picks up that house on Berlin Street down from Dunkin Donuts, tears it down as a vacant building, tears it down and builds his duplex on that. We've got a number of people who have that capacity to buy a vacant house. So what we've been trying to do is to connect up the developers with those vacant dilapidated houses and say, what's the barrier? Why hasn't this moved? Why haven't people fixed it up? It's vacant. It's falling down. There are trees growing out of the porch. There's, you know, are the taxes getting paid? So we'll find out is it coming up for tax sale? And you know, I think there are some two properties on Charles Street that came up. And, you know, there were a dozen builders who wanted to buy that on tax sale. So we can, we just have to get those moving and get them back on the market because we've got people who will buy those and fix those up. The city doesn't have to inspire people to do that. People will buy it, fix it, make money on it. You know, I mean, I guess my question is, I mean, everything is just like savings pasture. After that, I don't know what's left. We've got a couple other smaller ones that we look at. There is the parcel that's next to it, the one that they're doing the bath house proposal on. That same parcel, the same person doing that project is also looking at housing along Berry Street. That would be another opportunity. We don't have a lot of these larger ones. Crestview would be a very big one. That's off Terrace Street. That's another hundreds of acres big. We've got... Just so I understand, is that, is that on the other side from the capital complex of Bailey? If you're going Bailey, so if you went Bailey and Terrace, and so the Redstone building is owned by the same person, and then as you go up Terrace Street towards Middlesex, there's a small road on the left that would connect you over to, basically, that goes over to his parcel. As far as walkability, is that, that I've always thought of that as closer to downtown therefore maybe like what we, when we talk in here about walkability, that it's walkable, more walkable than these neighborhoods that are already out there. Yeah, that was his, that was one of his arguments to being included in the growth center was that he's actually more walkable closer to the downtown because he has the Redstone parcel. He now could do a development on top with a walking path through. The Redstone would have been his block before. He would have had everything that came down to Redstone building, but not technically had the legal ability to get across. So now he could develop up top with walking paths or bike paths or shared use path that could come down. How big is that parcel? A Redstone? No. His parcel, oh that's gotta be, I mean, Allen owns 600 acres? Okay. I mean, It goes like all the way down the state street. Yeah, all the way down the state street. He goes all the way around the cemetery, all the way to middle sex and it's, I don't know, quite. If there was a sincere interest in developing it, yeah, you'd think that we could work with that. And I think in certain cases we, we have hoped for years that we don't want to, we don't want to do. We want to help. And so we've been trying to find people who would purchase Sabin's pasture and then come to us and say, here's what I need from the city in order for me to develop this parcel. We haven't had that. And I think the same thing with Cresview. I think if there was a proposal that said, we'll put in X number of housing units, here's what we need. We need the city to help extend the sewer line or build a road or something then, or give us tax stabilization or give us, and then we could go through and consider how we would help. But we've tried to avoid for a long time being that developer. And we'll see if that changes because people have talked about Sabin's pasture for a long time as well. If the city buys Sabin's pasture, then we could get the park that we want and we get the housing that we want and considering nobody stepping up the build it, maybe we buy the parcel and then subdivide the lots and then we sell the lots to developers. I don't know where that conversation will go, but people throw around ideas a lot. That's just one of those ideas that is out there to get through that barrier of we don't have any lots, so people won't build. But it is in the TIF district, so we've put things in place so we can make a project like these happen. So again, so to increase housing, first time home buyer, downtown programs, MAPPA again, sprinkler ordinance again. Well that's just, in this case it's just mentioning that it's to exempt single family dwelling units. But it's more than that, right? But is this particular section only? It's the for sale, so I guess if it were a four unit condo, then it would be more than a single family. Right, I just, that kind of flagged something for me because it is more than that, right? Yeah, I can see. So again, where we are still looking to look at sprinkler incentives, we still want people to do it. And so that's still being included. And developing a housing market and marketing and outreach program really is to try to put all these tools in place and then try to get that developer class. And we really can't get there until we can start going out and contacting and talking to people to say, you can make money in Montpelier developing housing. Yeah, I mean, I guess my comments on these two questions or two sections, sorry, goals, they could be, there's some repetitiveness, they could be combined. And I don't, you know, I don't know. I think to me the most important thing is to lay out a goal for number of units and a marketing and outreach program. Like I don't know how much we need to talk about the sprinkler ordinance, but maybe that's important to remember that we, I don't know. So I also would ask them like how would the house, what's the vision for how the housing marketing and outreach program to flesh that out a little bit more and what resources would be needed? Because that does seem like a very important piece. And it's sort of like the last strategy of that goal. I was surprised so far down. Yeah, it was one that was added in later. It was more a matter of timing than it was ranking them by any importance. And I think we talked about this last time with the historic resources. We hadn't laid them out to be goal and strategy. And we talked about when we get done, we may reshuffle them to go through and say, this is talked about three times, we may just say it once and have something in the end that'll work. Yeah, I mean, they don't necessarily need to do that. I'm just a comment that's a little bit clunky to look at it here. Yeah, and a second comment about whether or not we need to continually bring up the sprinkler ordinance, but unless it's to notify people. Well, it was something that had been identified by some as a barrier. And I think because it happened, when this was written initially two years ago, it was saying that we should do it. And when we did it, we adjusted it to say continue to do it. All right, so. It was identified as a barrier, so. Doesn't say expand it. It doesn't say expand it. It doesn't say consider amending the sprinkler ordinance to exempt, I think is what it originally said. So again, some of these things that are just for the maintaining the housing types, I mean, we talked about continuing. There's a little bit that might seem why does that matter so much to continue to talk about these, but we are actually, our zoning congratulations to all the work you guys did on amending the districts. I look in my projects, when I look at the national stuff, people are trying very hard to get out of the old Euclidean zoning of this is single families. This is multifamily district. So all the multifamilies are together. All the single families are together. All the commercial is in one place. All the industrial is in another place. And for us, we already allow single families, duplexes, quadplexes, multifamily. And we have these great mixed neighborhoods. And so we just reflect that by saying we should continue to do that. Our densities are because of the work that we did in the zoning update to make that 90% rule apply. If it makes a big difference for not having a lot of nonconformities that other communities, when I read, as I said, when I'm reading my stuff, I'm always like, you know, these guys are like, did you know that you can't build your neighborhoods? I was like, I can. We already did that. We already fixed that. And then there has been a request from them to add in some incentives for the creation of senior housing projects. Do they imagine what that might be? They didn't get into the details. They just felt that was. A flag. It's a flag. It comes in in a couple of different directions. One of which is we have a lot of single family housing that is currently occupied and underused by predominantly seniors who are, who had housing that they raised their families in and they're now kind of overhoused. And we have a lot of younger families trying to move to the city if we could have more senior housing opportunities. Some people may look to downsize. Oh, move out. Move out. And therefore. We did the duplex ATU changes. And that was to give them another option to go through and say, well, if you want to stay there, great. Let's take some of that extra space and turn it into an ATU or somebody may just go and say, I'm gonna move. And that it reflects a little bit of the downsizer initiative and a little bit of just a reflection of our demographics. People are getting older and we're going to have a lot of seniors. And we should look to get more senior housing projects because we're also where a lot of our surrounding communities are tired to as well. Berry City, Berlin, up till here, we have sewer capacity. We could absorb places where, you know, callus and wood berry isn't our kind of ability to build the senior housing project. So yeah, our first, the first aspiration really looked at the housing market. Most people are gonna buy and live in housing that's market housing. So we really wanted to make sure we supported that. The second one started to look a little bit at neighborhoods. You know, basically how housing comes together and we wanted our neighborhoods to be proximate to open space and recreational resources, walkable and bikeable to the downtown with a mix of uses, complimentary neighborhoods down beside it. So you might have, you know, just residential for the meadow, but you also have an abutting Elm Street area, which is mixed use. So you would have the ability to, you know, within walking distance to a mixed use area. So I think those were some of the goals that we were looking at is to making sure and most of these are really just supporting what we have for other plans, supporting the green plant plan, supporting complete streets, you know, the housing people aren't going to put sidewalks in, but they support the complete streets plan to put sidewalks in. Do we have a written housing and neighborhoods plan? The last one, yeah, under goal C. Approval of work plan. It says the first strategy under goal C is housing and neighborhoods plan supports the implementation. This is the housing neighborhoods plan. Oh, this is it. Okay, all right, all right. It's this plan. This housing and neighborhoods plan supports these other guys. All right, all right. Speaking about itself in the third person. Yeah. Right. Maybe I should say this housing and neighborhoods plan. This plan, that would help, yeah. I think that could be the other place where it says what pillar of the city, I mean. Yeah. Yeah, and I haven't gone through to make that change. So goal C kind of gets, or aspiration C kind of looks at all those rules, all those things that we do that make housing and neighborhoods safe and healthy, energy efficient, resilient, designed for all the users. So this is really where we start talking about our building codes, health codes, zoning codes, sprinkler ordinance. Mike, sorry, can I just ask about the last strategy on aspiration B? Continue to allow housing above commercial uses, but there's nothing in there about encouraging it or incentivizing it. I mean, we've got a lot of vacant space still. So yeah, when it comes to regulations, and this was in that implementation strategy, the butterfly drain bills and unicorns, when we talked about regulations, you could go from discouraging to incentivizing to allowing to, I guess it would be disincentivizing, and then incentivize and then require. So you kind of have this thing along there. They just tag, because this is talking about regulations, they peg that when they're just gonna say, hey, we should at least just continue to allow it. If there's a goal that says we should go more than just allowing it. In some cases, things will happen simply by allowing it. Right. Things won't happen because you don't allow it. Well, if we're incentivizing the senior housing projects, I guess they are saying they have used incentivize in previous strategies. Yes, and yeah, and I think in that case, they were trying to get more work more with the planned unit developments and those types of things to be able to come up with strategies to incentivize senior housing. In this case, they were just acknowledging, again, because I see beyond Montpelier, I can see when I reviewed some regulations for another community, they didn't allow two primary uses on the same parcel. So it was very difficult to put a daycare facility in a single family home because they were both primary uses and you were only allowed to have one primary use. It seems ridiculous, but you would be shocked how many zoning regulations in the United States have requirements like that. Ours, we already have kind of sifted through that as many primary uses as you want and you can mix them, so you can have residential units over your commercials. So they were just willing to allow, but not to incentivize or encourage? Yeah. I mean, that was basically a choice. Yes. That they made. Yeah. All right, because this would also be something that we could modify the zoning regulations to incentivize. Yeah. I mean, we would have to have a conversation of how we would do that. Right. So yeah, the next set, C just was where we kind of lumped together all of those rules and regulations. How would we, you know, when it comes to safety, we as a city, we enforce building codes on single family homes. We don't have to, as a city, our building inspector does. We're only required by state law to do commercial, so commercial and industrial, so we enforce it because, and this kind of explains why we do that because it establishes minimum safety and we do it for the safety of the people who live here. Same with health codes. Improve the long-term efficiency. These will probably get modified a little bit to reflect what comes out of the energy plan. Can I, I mean, both of these, I think they're both laudable, that's great. But, and I just don't know the answer to this, but it'd be helpful, I think, for the city plan, at least for this section, and I understand that it's gonna tie into the energy plan, is if there's ways to identify how the cities can specifically support the implementation of those plans, I just don't know what the answer to that is. Yeah, the details of how those energy plans would be implemented are in the energy plan. I think what it is on this side is just gonna say, hey, we support what they're doing. Yeah, all right. However they're doing it. However they get it done, we don't care. Hopefully we're gonna have a plan prepared by someone. So this, so again, the goal C, same thing, is just tying into almost acknowledging what we already do to everybody. We have River Hazard Regulations and we have them because it is for the safe and healthy of our residents. Is goal D, it's universally accessible. Are they talking about ADA accessible? Yes, predominantly that's ADA accessibility. Then what is the complete streets come into that as a strategy under goal D? It's both, so it's improved neighborhood accessibility and increased the number of homes that are universally accessible on the first floor. So there were two. That's the neighborhood accessibility, I see, okay. And then the last thing we have here is the more broad discussion that explains all the other things that we do, housing for all, affirmatively furthering fair housing in order to protect people from discrimination, promote economic opportunities and create a diverse inclusive community. So most of what the Housing Task Force does is really why do we sponsor French Block and all these different projects. Most of that is actually coming into this area. Affordable housing and what are we doing to further affordable housing and fair housing? So under goal A strategy, the first strategy, the housing planning effort would be something that would be done by home. That would be Housing Task Force. So the likely candidate for that project would be the State Street Church. Oh, right. Christchurch. So Christchurch has been looking to do a housing project on the back of their church. And that has been in conversation because they need the parking garage. And so the parking garage both helped and hurt their project, but they worked out a deal that works for them and helps with their project to get going. So there's a number of these that will eventually need some funding. And that would probably be 30 to 40 units of affordable housing. Is that one project? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. That's great. Existing building, too. Yeah, the building would come down, the existing rectory building on the back. Yeah, that kind of extension off the back. Yeah, it's a really poor, yeah, it's a really low quality structure. And so they're gonna keep that face, that face of State Street, that granite face, but they would build a new addition on the back. Are you talking about aspiration D goal A? Yeah, the question was supporting at least one planning effort to identify community housing needs and study. Well, yeah, I read that differently. Oh, that may be the different one. That's the fair housing one. There is one in here where they talk about doing one project. Okay. Or there should be. That's, yeah, to have $200,000 in reserves. And that's what the $200,000 in reserves is for. Is for. We match funds and that's a lot of reasons why we get so many funds from the state and federal government when we apply to CDBG funds is because the city has been willing to raise money and then put them into these projects to go. It'll be a five, 10 million dollar project and we'll put $100,000 into it. And even though it sounds like a small amount of money to the people we are applying for funds for seeing the city's commitment to the project by putting real dollars behind it helps us get funded. So, yeah, I mean, this strategy of the housing planning effort to identify community housing needs seems like it also needs some understanding of what resources, because you probably the housing task force is not going to do that themselves. You're a consultant. Yeah, I think. Yeah, yeah. The number of times we, I think in the past what these have been used for in the past is usually we do have barriers to affordable housing every couple of years. There'll be other studies similar to that where we try to understand something about our housing needs. And so we wanted to reflect that in there because sometimes down street or other folks will be the ones that do this and they want the grant support so we can be able to identify that point to that. Was there a barrier study recently done? Should we look at that? I think there was. They know what it is. It may be a barrier study that comes up. It may be something else. I know 2014 there was one, I don't know if there was another one that came up. Are these general barriers or are they looking at just one specific? They'll study broadly. Okay. And sometimes it may be, yeah. If there's not a lot of trouble could you share the last one with us? And I think that would inform our work on this. So yeah, that's the most recent. So these guys, the housing committee had had this probably back in 2017. They were the first ones and actually 16, they may have been the first ones that we started working on this on. We revised it in 17, revised it in 18 and they just finished revising this a couple of weeks ago again. So again, perhaps we need to add elements for homelessness. We can certainly see whether they feel they have things that would apply to this or as we said, community services. They will certainly be included. All the committees will probably be included somewhere. Whether they get asked to craft their own chapter or not. Or whether it would fit into this. Or whether it fits into this one. We're talking about temporary housing. Yeah, it could be. I don't know what they're, I don't know where they are thinking. So I have to kind of see. Yeah. We also asked about the drug treatment piece. Yeah, I mean, that's probably one, your idea would probably be one that would get inserted somewhere in that aspiration D where we have that, we would probably look at, is it already allowed under state law or is it something, are we looking to simply allow it in the regulations or is it something that we are, is our strategy, our action step to sponsor? Or I think we have to kind of. I think down streets don't work on this too. And then down streets involved in some of this. So down street would be, I think be one that could help answer that. Do we need to incentivize or just simply allow that kind of question? And are we not allowing it now? Aren't we allowing it in certain housing districts? I think it depends what is the technical, what is it that's being looked at in some cases, something small like a group home. Yeah. And group homes have a special definition under state law and which one are we talking about? Because I think one of them does not qualify. And I can't remember if it was the drug treatment or if it is the furloughed prisoners. I can't remember which one. One of them is expressly not a group home that is for this is not considered a group home that's a protected use. So. I feel like down street may have like a whole section on their website. I don't know if you've looked at it, but I could send that around if that's helpful. If people are interested. Yeah, that can be helpful. I think they have some stuff specifically maybe even on. And even if we've got specific things, I think if we came up with a specific list that said, we'd really like to see some conversation or some understanding of this, this and this. I think the housing task force would really take, would really enjoy taking that as okay, maybe we should look harder to make sure we, because when I put these things together, I'm trying to do the best I can to throw everything at it. And if there's something that's missed, that's what this process is for to go through and say, we really didn't tackle this and are we, you know, we will have a chapter in, as a part of the governance chapter, we've got the goals of being an inclusive community. What is it? Inclusive, equitable and engaged community. That's the mission of the other committee that was created this year. And so that's gonna be one that's gonna come up in governance and how we operate, but it also is gonna have to be reflected in our chapters. And we certainly don't meet that if we exclude groups of people. I think this is great, this is really great work. Do we have any other comments to send back to the housing task force? Just just a few things, so. Do we wanna, if you mentioned Airbnb, do we wanna add that to the conversation or not really? At least to the extent. They've talked about it and they've decided not to pursue that angle, but I haven't heard them talk about what you're talking about. So, I mean, I would definitely think. Group homes. I think with the Airbnb issue is like too, what extent does it create a problem for housing? Yeah, great. I don't know. And that could be something we could ask about what their feeling is for how much of a problem it is. It could be a continue to monitor. Continue to monitor. Yeah, I mean, I guess the question is, what do we do with that information? I mean, once we have a better sense of what it is, what's the problem? Cities do things to curtail short-term rentals, is the general term used for that. Isn't part of it too, in terms of limiting people taking entire apartments or entire homes and then moving to Florida for the winter, doesn't some kind of owner occupy building help to handle that? There are a number of strategies communities have done. Larger communities have had bigger issues in that I guess there's, there are large, there are companies now that just go through and buy, you'll find entire streets that have been bought up by one company, if it's down in Florida and the coast or something like that. Montreal. Montreal, yes. If you wanna visit Montreal, you'll find an Airbnb. It's the whole city's Airbnb's now. But that's been the issue. We haven't seen that here as much. A lot of ours are kind of small, one-off. Yeah, that's kind of what it is. Two-off things. That's kind of what we're gonna get. We're not Brooklyn. No, yeah. And I understand that. And also, this has come up a few times in my conversation, but there's some people, I know of some people in town that use one of these websites, but it's for their whole house that they kind of share with the guests, which is not a housing create problem really, as opposed to like these other situations that we're talking about where. A condo is bought, taken off the market and used just for Airbnb. That's the thing, that's potentially a problem. But we don't really have an idea of how many of those are actually happening in the city. I mean, it just seems to me that the underlying, the risk of the Airbnb issue is it impacts the vacancy in the area. And to the extent that we have a very low vacancy rate as it is, you know, I think, I just think hurting our efforts too. Well, I mean, I get that, but I mean, we're talking about, you know, aspirationally having 150 units online in the next five years, upwards of over 200 in the course of eight years, you know, I feel like any Airbnb impact would be on the margins at best. I just think that that might, it might create a bigger problem, not only today, it may suck a lot of resources today, it's just sort of getting our arms around it and it could cause bigger problems down the road. I just don't think it's worth diving into that issue. It's an interesting one and it's probably important, but I think for purposes of getting this out the door, I just think it could take up a lot of oxygen. I mean, I think my interest is more in, I mean, like to me, Airbnb's are sort of way that you get around zoning, like you're doing lodging in residential neighborhoods and that's why I think they should have some sort of, you know, I don't know, registration process or something in the city. I tend to agree with you, but again, this isn't Montreal, it's not Brooklyn. Right, no, I know it's not a severe issue. We have a long history of housing legislators in people's homes, so we already sort of have that, so if we start cutting the legislators out, what are we gonna do? Well, I mean, that to me is a little bit different, but yeah, it's like a seasonal long-term rental, but anyway. That one's even more closely aligned to housing. Legislators should build their own apartments. Yeah, I think they should have a apartment in the capital. They should have a door. In the capital complex, in debt. We're gonna do it around that. The hill, the hill behind that speaker. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's anecdotally, you know, I've heard people in central Vermont generally talk about wanting to, you know, do an Airbnb for their home during the ski season, but I don't know to what extent that occurs here in my opinion, I just don't know. This is 50 or 60, probably. It's more, 50 or 60? It's not during the ski season as much here as it is from our college. And you know, VCFA has one week intensive people to hear. Yeah, I think I agree. I don't know that it's a big problem, but I mean, I don't know that it's a big problem, but I think not recognizing it, maybe could that make us look like we're just like, you know, I don't know if there's a way to just like acknowledge that it exists. Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, so when we look back at our implementation that the big butterfly and those unicorns, the plan, we have planning as one of our things that we can do. And that really is for those things that we just don't know, either don't know what to do or just need to, and that's why I think in this case, we just may monitor and plan for it accordingly. And just, I thought at some point something has got to give. So many people are going into Airbnb that at some point, you know, just economics has got to take over. I mean, there's got to be a certain thing where you just realize I can make more money renting this than I can in Airbnb and put it back into the rental market. But we haven't reached that point and I just don't know when we will, but I just keep thinking, or if we got the hotel built, then we would have another 80 units of hotels. Maybe that takes the air out of some of the. If you have more Airbnb units, then their occupancy rate will go down. And so people would then maybe decide that they wanted to create. But so many of these are just not appropriate as apartments. Yeah, and that's the case. And that was when I was in New Hampshire last month that was one of the classes at the planning conference I was at was all about Airbnbs. And because it was all of Northern New England, you've got places that are orchard beach out to stow into us and you can kind of see, look at these guys. I feel bad for you guys. That's just, that's rough down there to see how much Airbnb is impacting things. So I feel fortunate that we don't have to try to tackle it yet. But certainly these places that have these beach homes and how much difference does it make down there? If it's a beach home that people are only staying in a couple of months anyways, what's the harm in renting it out for Airbnb for the other times you're not there, all right? So maybe we could ask the housing task force for just a comment on how they proceed, whether it's a problem that might help just. But this is not like any of us are champion of the bit. It just seems like, yeah. Yeah, I mean I kind of, oh sorry. I was just gonna say I like your idea of putting something in there that's like monitored. Yeah, like we're aware. Right, yeah. I don't want us to fee, I don't want us, people to see that this section and think like this is not aware of the modern landscape. So. Another question. And we don't have to address it tonight and I don't really know how to address it but there's not a ton of anything in here about rental except kind of generally and then there's the one conductive housing survey to determine if rently and it's not pillier generally, meet minimum housing standards. Perhaps that's enough but I'm, and I don't know how we're gonna answer it. I'm just curious. Where is that again? People, which is, oh sorry. It was, Aspirations C, goal eight and the last strategy, it's all on page four. And perhaps this is enough to speak to rental units but I just felt like I should ask the question like do we feel like it's enough? I kind of don't really know. For regarding what issue? Just the quality. Just like yeah, quality if there's enough than the cost and. Yeah, the enough would probably be in a different, that would probably be more in the first one. Aspiration A. This one was looking more specifically at, and it's a question that comes up and goes away and comes up and goes away and we never know. Some people have felt that some of our housing doesn't meet minimum housing standards and when we kind of talk more about it, it comes a little bit more down to, I can't believe I pay 1,100 bucks a month when it's, for this. And we're like that's not really a minimum housing standard. It actually meets the minimum housing standards. It's just your 1970 shag carpeting, you're paying a lot for a little. They just haven't updated. Yeah, it's, you're paying a lot of money for something that's probably not worth it, but that doesn't make it unsafe. And that's where we try to get back to Aspiration A where we're like, boy, if we had more then there's competition among landlords to go through and say, well, I can't rent this unit. I guess I'm gonna have to fix it up. And when I fix it up. Do we have confidence though, that the housing units do meet housing standards? And that's the question. There are some people that come forward and say that, you know, regardless, people are paying $900 for units that don't meet minimum housing codes. And that's a question of, you know, is it an issue? How big of an issue is it? And we just don't have enough to wrap our arms around. So it's been proposed. It's in this year's work plan to do that survey. How would that be conducted? Our proposal at this point is to just randomly select a fixed number of units, select them out and just randomly go in and ask landlords, you need permission of the landlord, you need permission of the tenant to go through and do housing inspection. And we would just survey and examine them. We can't look at all 1,800 housing units. Yeah, that's what I was wondering. We would just pick 30 of them to go in and go and say, you know, if we survey 30 and we find 11 of them don't meet minimum housing standards, then we have a big problem. If we survey 30 and we don't find many or if they consistently have the same issue, disconnected smoke alarms. You know, it's like, well, it doesn't meet minimum housing standards because the smoke alarms disconnected. Well, it's probably not, you know, the solution to that is probably doesn't need a very city style rental inspection program where they have a program that their fire, the fire department goes in and inspects all the housing units over a period of time. Every housing unit, every rental housing unit has to pay $100 a year, whatever it is, $50 a year to go into a fund that pays for the program to get administered and so, but it's a lot of work. Yeah. If you are, you know, I've been a former planner for Berry City, it is a community that had a lot of substandard housing. It was some pretty bad housing. I haven't seen that here, but I don't get into the houses as often as I did over there. Do minimum housing standards include codes, fire code? Usually the minimum housing standards are different. They're looking at something different, but usually if you end up with a rental inspection program, you will end up usually sending somebody in who's trained to do inspections on both. Yeah, that's right, because if, you know, we're only specifically saying minimum housing standards here, but what if the other point would be minimum fire codes? Yeah, we would expect most of these probably, depending on how you're looking at it. You have housing codes, you have fire codes, and then you're going to have ones that are what's, you know, they don't 100% meet it, but they're grandfathered in and, you know, so it depends where you're drawing the line on those. That is usually addressed on, you know, the amount of work that would usually require hiring two and a half more people. Right, right, Chris and three other people. Yeah, Chris, yeah. And that would be a lot of work. And so the question is if you have a serious issue, it's worth the money, it's worth the time. If you don't have a serious issue, maybe we find a different way of resolving those. So. Okay, so we're out of time. Do we have a third chapter lined up for next week? I don't, oh, we do have to ask the question. Two weeks from now is the 23rd. Christmas week. I can do it. Okay, I'm just, let's, I said it's a few minutes in. Christmas Eve, I would say no. Let's give it, is that okay with you, Marcel? If we just give 23rd. The 23rd, I'm gonna be out of town anyways. I think that, yeah, chances are we're not gonna have it. Gonna get pretty thin. All right, so I will cancel the 23rd. So for the meeting after that, we'll certainly get a third chapter and then review the feedback so far. Yes, and so I've got a number of chapters I'm working on. By that time, I might have energy. I might have, yeah, I might have a couple other chapters that I've been working on, so. So the next is the 13th, yeah. Six, second. January. Four, second and fourth. Oh, sorry, four. Second and fourth. 13th, yeah, 13th. 13th, right, yeah, that's. Okay. My automatic. My birthday. I can't, it's gonna be a new year when we meet next. And the next time we meet. It's your birthday. It'll be my birthday on the 19th. Oh, thanks for telling us. I'm gonna have to do something special. Thank you. Nothing big on this one. This is just. So you guys are gonna meet with Historic tomorrow. Are they gonna, what's the play with these questions? Do we have a poll? They're gonna start to, we're gonna start to see where they go. We're gonna get feedback and maybe start, and then we'll revisit and incorporate and make changes that we wanna make based on what, how they answer. Yeah, I kinda held off on doing a real deep dive on the Historic preservation one just cause I knew we had these questions pending, but. Yeah, okay, we'll get that back. Yeah, and the more I hear how you guys are asking questions, the more I can adjust the next one's going forward. We're kinda winging it. We're not following any rule book. We're making up the rules as we go along. Yeah, I think that it's such a big project. Just kinda gotta be flexible. All right. Motion to adjourn. Okay, motion from Erin, seconded by Barb. And it's non-divisible, we are adjourned.